Those are good thoughts - especially your distinction between access control and subscription. There is of course a 3rd model - think of the electric company. There my house is metered and, if I don't use any electricity, I don't get billed. Or, sometimes (as with the phone company) there is a fixed "baseline" bill for having the service available (ie, access control) and then I pay additionally based on how much I use. I suspect a pure subscription model or this 3rd variation (usage-based) is what software services will evolve into. As you correctly point out, the "you bought it you own it" model is really more about physical ownership.
Just the same as making a tractor is a service, but the tractor itself is not a service.
Or you could hire someone to plow your field - that would be a service. Now, they might use a tractor, but you don't care, as long as the field gets plowed to your specifications.
You can't eliminate the capacity of human language to convey lies.... Surely you aren't too stupid to see the difference there?
I fail to see what text in my comment suggested that I believe one could eliminate the capacity of human language to convey lies. I was merely bringing up a hypothetical side affect of having a system as described in the article (you did read the article, right?). For this you accuse me of being stupid?
And, as regards your comment about 40% of Americans believeing Saddam was linked to 9/11 (I am not among them by the way), you have re-inforced my point. Basically I was saying that systems such as are being discussed in the article would base the measure of "truth" or "lie" on the available information on the web (like page-ranking). So, the more blogs and web pages and cross-linked articles that suggested such a connection existed, the more likely your assertion that there is no connection would be graded a lie. Surely you are not too stupid to understand my point?
It works like this. You have two computer screens. On one you're typing, on the other comments appear checking the accuracy of what you are saying, suggesting better ways of making the same point.
Will anything "original" ever be written again? If everyone uses this "tool" to vet/scrub/tweak/improve everything they say, wouldn't this simply promote group-think?
In a world such as that, controlling the contents of the web would give tremendous power. Imagine bots that auto-generated blogs pushing your own agenda, all to ratchet up the numbers to influence the "truth-engines".
That's pretty scary when you consider that nearly each and every board room, meeting room and government office has a system that is exposed to the net with what amount to standardized backdoors into the system.
Ahhh, you have hit upon it. You have uncovered the hidden agenda.
So in principle anything could be hidden there on purpose or by accident
Exactly.
That's really scary when you realize that no one outside of the original vendor can do code audits.
And of course no one outside of the original vendor can *change* the code either.
Or, if you are of a left-wing persuasian, CNN is always readily available. Face it, pols will invariably give better access to those media who paint them in a more favorable light, and there is plenty of that to go around on both sides of the aisle.
None of the big news outlets dare show such a stunt because that would make public figures accountable.
Actually, I think the reason the big news outlets don't do this is because they would lose access to the public figures, who would cut them off. And then TDS's ability to show these clips would disappear as well, since many of the clips *come from* the big news outlets. Sadly, it seems either we accept the soft-and-chewy reporting of the big news outlets as it is, or we get nothing, as the pols will simply stop talking to the media.
What is it about OSS that makes it so expensive to support? Most of the comments in this thread say the OSS license expense is all about support costs. What's the deal? Is this stuff so difficult to install, configure, and keep running that lots of expert support is required? Funny, from everything else I've read on these boards you pretty much wave an OSS CD by your machine and it installs and configures itself to perfection, anticipating your every need and whim. Which is it? Is OSS finicky and hence hard to maintain, thereby justifying the high support costs, or are these OSS vendors fleecing their customers?
Re:This is the beginning of the end
on
The Next X Prize
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
There's a war on the horizon and the denying this technology to us proles us is going to be a major weapon.
Calm down. Technology, if it is useful, invariably gets cheaper and hence more accessible. Once upon a time only the "rich" had cell phones. Only the "wealthy" had home computers. Only the "powerful" had access to the internet. Only the "elite" had access to medicines and health care. Cars were in the domain of the rich. Ditto air travel. The list goes on and on. Mark my words, if mapping your genomes is something you as an individual want and will pay for, companies will find a way to bring it to you at an affordable rate. And when that happens, we can thank all those wealthy, rich and powerful people who payed huge sums in the earliest days, thereby giving the developers of the technology (and their investors) the cash they need to make improvements. More often than not, early consumers of advanced technologies are subsidizing its development for subsequent offerings to the masses.
The problem is this government is corrupt (there, I said it) and is giving out favors to friends.
Get out! Governments give out favors to friends? I live in the patronage-laden bastion of democracy called Massachusetts (one party state), so claiming there is such a thing as government kickbacks and favoritism is not exactly a revelation to me - I've been living in such an environment for a long time. That said, I can attest that ascribing this (corrupt) behavior uniquely to the Bush administration is monumentally naive. The old axiom is true: Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
new immigrants (legal and illegal) plus births to immigrants add some 2.3 million people to the United States each year, accounting for most of the nation's population increase. In fact, because natives have only two children on average, absent the additions that come from immigrants, the U.S. population would be roughly stable in the long-run without continued high levels of immigration.
Now why is it that so many people choose to immigrate to the US? And what would become of these people if they didn't emmigrate from their home countries? Answer: they would still add to the world population. So, the US isn't inflating the world population, it is merely responsible for a re-distribution. The real question here is why do so many people move to the U.S. versus, say Europe or Japan?
who thinks that the vast majority of MS Office purchases (like 95%) are businesses? last time I checked, businesses didn't shop at Walmart or their equivalent when purchasing their software. Now perhaps Joe Random User might buy this stuff, but that won't put a dent in MS sales, other than perhaps the "Student Edition" of Office.
... if the search companies were required to tell *us* our *own* search history. Of course there is the non-trivial issue of identify verification which, if not done properly, could lead to much abuse.
Given the way that these guys are touting how Firefox is vulnerable because they were able to find a bug that they refused to warn the firefox team about (like that refusal is Firefox's fault) I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that they managed to get some funding (either direct or indirect) from Microsoftl.
Or perhaps, being black hat types, they are trying to discredit Firefox because it makes their jobs tougher than IE does. Maybe they want to drive people back to IE.
Look, Apple has always emphasized design, appearance and usability. And they have always catered to the less technical among us ("computers for the rest of us)". Of course that doesn't mean their machines don't also appeal to techies. In fact now that they don't carry as steep a price penalty, and now that it is possible to dual boot to Windows, their appeal has grown in that regard. But still their bread-and-butter is people who don't want to fuss with their PCs and who don't want to become computer geeks. This upsampled "hi-res" video ploy, then, would seem to indicate that Apple knows their clientele is largely technically uninformed, and so they believe they can get away with it. Sure, some techies will notice and scream (witness this forum), but frankly most of Apple's customers are not techies, and most don't even associate with techies. That's one big reason why they bought Apple in the first place.
Actually I was able to use the free VMWare player on XP and install Ubuntu 6.06 (http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/5 59), which is one of the Virtual Appliances available on the VMWare site. It was pretty cool.
It used to be that Apple was the darling of the TV/Movie business. Of course that was usually on the hardware side. Ordinarily the "screen shots" were graphic-artist nonsense that photographed well (and of course, there is always a beep or click when each character appears on the screen). Maybe now we'll see Apple hardware, and then the screen shots will be Linux. That would be a bit incongruous, but very likely something Hollywood would do.
... submit it back to the maintainers of your Linux distro, who usually roll it into the main tree eventually.
Ahhh... that is exactly what I said up above (and for which I was called a fool), only I used slightly different words (I called it "negotiating with the community") - which amounts to essentially getting somebody to approve your bug fix in the public source tree. So I wasn't far off base after all. In the end, either you have your own source tree (i.e. your own distribution, by which I mean not just config changes on top of a public distribution) and make bug fixes there, or you use the "public" source tree, periodically (at your choice of intervals) pulling a new tree, and then trying to convince the distribution managers to include your bug fix. I guess the assumption is that these OSS distribution arbiters are much more receptive to including 3rd party submitted bug fixes than Microsoft is to fixing bugs you submit to them (that they must debug and fix) - probably a correct assumption.
Then you add that software package patch to your repository and submit it back to the maintainers of your Linux distro, who usually roll it into the main tree eventually.
So there is some risk, when you re-sync, that your fix gets overwritten with a version that doesn't have your fix. So there must be a need to track these things - worst case i guess you re-sync and then merge your fix into the new tree.
Thanks - I appreciate you taking the time to answer my questions rather than attacking me as others in this forum did. I can easily see how going from NT4->W2K3 or Vista would be alot of work. It seems that the work is pretty different though, relative to converting to OSS. My sense is the latter requires more technical skill "in house", but the former is probably more expensive since a significant chunk of change gets sent to Microsoft. You alluded to the calculations that need to be made to balance these - I suppose it also depends on how comfortable you are managing your own distribution. I frankly am skeptical that it makes sense to keep your own source tree and "hire a guy to fix a nasty bug" as the grandparent suggested, but I have minimal understanding of the OSS model so I can't really say for sure.
Slashdot Mirror
Those are good thoughts - especially your distinction between access control and subscription. There is of course a 3rd model - think of the electric company. There my house is metered and, if I don't use any electricity, I don't get billed. Or, sometimes (as with the phone company) there is a fixed "baseline" bill for having the service available (ie, access control) and then I pay additionally based on how much I use. I suspect a pure subscription model or this 3rd variation (usage-based) is what software services will evolve into. As you correctly point out, the "you bought it you own it" model is really more about physical ownership.
And, as regards your comment about 40% of Americans believeing Saddam was linked to 9/11 (I am not among them by the way), you have re-inforced my point. Basically I was saying that systems such as are being discussed in the article would base the measure of "truth" or "lie" on the available information on the web (like page-ranking). So, the more blogs and web pages and cross-linked articles that suggested such a connection existed, the more likely your assertion that there is no connection would be graded a lie. Surely you are not too stupid to understand my point?
Will anything "original" ever be written again? If everyone uses this "tool" to vet/scrub/tweak/improve everything they say, wouldn't this simply promote group-think?
In a world such as that, controlling the contents of the web would give tremendous power. Imagine bots that auto-generated blogs pushing your own agenda, all to ratchet up the numbers to influence the "truth-engines".
What is it about OSS that makes it so expensive to support? Most of the comments in this thread say the OSS license expense is all about support costs. What's the deal? Is this stuff so difficult to install, configure, and keep running that lots of expert support is required? Funny, from everything else I've read on these boards you pretty much wave an OSS CD by your machine and it installs and configures itself to perfection, anticipating your every need and whim. Which is it? Is OSS finicky and hence hard to maintain, thereby justifying the high support costs, or are these OSS vendors fleecing their customers?
Source: http://www.cis.org/articles/2005/back1105.html
here's a quote from that source:
Now why is it that so many people choose to immigrate to the US? And what would become of these people if they didn't emmigrate from their home countries? Answer: they would still add to the world population. So, the US isn't inflating the world population, it is merely responsible for a re-distribution. The real question here is why do so many people move to the U.S. versus, say Europe or Japan?
who thinks that the vast majority of MS Office purchases (like 95%) are businesses? last time I checked, businesses didn't shop at Walmart or their equivalent when purchasing their software. Now perhaps Joe Random User might buy this stuff, but that won't put a dent in MS sales, other than perhaps the "Student Edition" of Office.
... if the search companies were required to tell *us* our *own* search history. Of course there is the non-trivial issue of identify verification which, if not done properly, could lead to much abuse.
You don't save the state of the VM when you exit. That way you start fresh each time.
Look, Apple has always emphasized design, appearance and usability. And they have always catered to the less technical among us ("computers for the rest of us)". Of course that doesn't mean their machines don't also appeal to techies. In fact now that they don't carry as steep a price penalty, and now that it is possible to dual boot to Windows, their appeal has grown in that regard. But still their bread-and-butter is people who don't want to fuss with their PCs and who don't want to become computer geeks. This upsampled "hi-res" video ploy, then, would seem to indicate that Apple knows their clientele is largely technically uninformed, and so they believe they can get away with it. Sure, some techies will notice and scream (witness this forum), but frankly most of Apple's customers are not techies, and most don't even associate with techies. That's one big reason why they bought Apple in the first place.
Actually I was able to use the free VMWare player on XP and install Ubuntu 6.06 (http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/5 59), which is one of the Virtual Appliances available on the VMWare site. It was pretty cool.
It used to be that Apple was the darling of the TV/Movie business. Of course that was usually on the hardware side. Ordinarily the "screen shots" were graphic-artist nonsense that photographed well (and of course, there is always a beep or click when each character appears on the screen). Maybe now we'll see Apple hardware, and then the screen shots will be Linux. That would be a bit incongruous, but very likely something Hollywood would do.
... submit it back to the maintainers of your Linux distro, who usually roll it into the main tree eventually.
... that is exactly what I said up above (and for which I was called a fool), only I used slightly different words (I called it "negotiating with the community") - which amounts to essentially getting somebody to approve your bug fix in the public source tree. So I wasn't far off base after all. In the end, either you have your own source tree (i.e. your own distribution, by which I mean not just config changes on top of a public distribution) and make bug fixes there, or you use the "public" source tree, periodically (at your choice of intervals) pulling a new tree, and then trying to convince the distribution managers to include your bug fix. I guess the assumption is that these OSS distribution arbiters are much more receptive to including 3rd party submitted bug fixes than Microsoft is to fixing bugs you submit to them (that they must debug and fix) - probably a correct assumption.
Ahhh
Then you add that software package patch to your repository and submit it back to the maintainers of your Linux distro, who usually roll it into the main tree eventually.
So there is some risk, when you re-sync, that your fix gets overwritten with a version that doesn't have your fix. So there must be a need to track these things - worst case i guess you re-sync and then merge your fix into the new tree.
Thanks for the clarification.
Thanks - I appreciate you taking the time to answer my questions rather than attacking me as others in this forum did. I can easily see how going from NT4->W2K3 or Vista would be alot of work. It seems that the work is pretty different though, relative to converting to OSS. My sense is the latter requires more technical skill "in house", but the former is probably more expensive since a significant chunk of change gets sent to Microsoft. You alluded to the calculations that need to be made to balance these - I suppose it also depends on how comfortable you are managing your own distribution. I frankly am skeptical that it makes sense to keep your own source tree and "hire a guy to fix a nasty bug" as the grandparent suggested, but I have minimal understanding of the OSS model so I can't really say for sure.